PS4’s Great Socialist Experiment: The Tomorrow Children

Think back to Gamescom this past summer. Sony unleashed a torrent of information about some new, upcoming exclusives, and the strangest and most mysterious of them all was surely The Tomorrow Children, an upcoming PS4 title from Q-Games, the Japanese studio best-known for its PixelJunk series.

The thing is, I didn’t really quite get what The Tomorrow Children was all about. Its introductory trailer – seen below – did a wonderful job of conveying its overwhelmingly intentional Soviet audio and visual style -- and we learned a bit more about it at Gamescom, particularly when it comes to plot -- but the game itself seemed to be most akin to Minecraft. I wondered after Gamescom whether that was a fair – albeit brief – assessment of what Q-Games has cooking up in its Kyoto-based offices. The good news is, I didn’t have to wonder for long. I got to speak with Q-Games’ founder, Dylan Cuthbert, at TGS several weeks ago, where he fielded my questions and gave me a better idea of just what The Tomorrow Children is striving to be.

The story surrounding the development of The Tomorrow Children begins over three years ago. Q-Games, as a trusted PlayStation-affiliated developer for many years, was clued in early-on as to what the PlayStation 4 would be. That got Cuthbert’s mind going about the possibilities of what he could do, stumbling upon the so-called “social action” genre for his new project.

“[PlayStation 4] was going to be about sharing and community – well, basically what the Internet is about for the moment, right? – and so we thought, ‘Well, we need to design a game that is interesting within that kind of scope,’” Cuthbert recalled. The key for him and his team was creating a collaborative game that played-up PS4’s emphasis on interconnectivity.

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The story surrounding the development of The Tomorrow Children begins over three years ago.

“And so we decided to go for a game where you collaborate with everybody else in a kind of loose fashion,” he continued. “Not like a multiplayer [game], like you’re always there with each other, but... even people who like [single]-player games, and don’t really like multiplayer games, will still enjoy our game. It’s not in your face all the time.”

The idea for The Tomorrow Children did indeed start with Mojang’s incredibly popular game Minecraft, but Cuthbert refers to it only as “a reference point.” He explained further: “We developed the technology that eventually ended up being like Minecraft, but it wasn’t designed to be like that from the beginning… But the game itself is kind of like… it’s more about working with each other, like in a society. So it’s more like a virtual society, I suppose, in a way. But not in a virtual society like The Sims or something like that, but more like a game-like virtual society...”

Your town. Do what you will.

Cuthbert revealed that as Q-Games worked more and more on the technology behind The Tomorrow Children, it became obvious that it allowed for “deforming landscapes,” and how its emphasis on mining was a result of literally being able to dig holes in the game. “But the game doesn’t solely revolve around that like Minecraft does,” Cuthbert insisted, reiterating that “It’s much more of a community kind of game.”

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Not surprisingly, the communal, always-connected aspect of The Tomorrow Children set the stage for its Soviet-era visual and sonic qualities, not to mention the gameplay mechanics at the center of the experience.

Not surprisingly, the communal, always-connected aspect of The Tomorrow Children set the stage for its Soviet-era visual and sonic qualities, not to mention the gameplay mechanics at the center of the experience. The idea for moving towards a Soviet theme “came in as we were [working on the game],” Cuthbert explained. “We suddenly realized that it would be a perfect fit for it. So we were beginning to come up with these kind of rules and things for this sort of social order within the game, and then we suddenly realized that it kind of feels a bit like Marxism or, you know, that kind of [thing]. And so we thought, ‘Well, let’s push that even further, and make it like a bit of a parody of the Cold War.’ Kind of what we imagine life behind the Iron Curtain was like.”

“It probably was like that, but we didn’t really see into it, right? Sort of back in the day, Soviet Russia was a very mysterious place. For me, that was a really interesting era to explore, and one that hasn’t really been explored that much in games.” Cuthbert pointed to Papers, Please as a great game that explores similar themes, further cementing his instincts that The Tomorrow Children’s heavily Soviet slant could work.

As for The Tomorrow Children as a gameplay experience? Cuthbert elaborated. “It involves you sort of collecting resources and building up your town together, but you don’t have to do that all the time. It’s much more relaxed. It’s more of a sandbox, very open. Basically, in the game, you can do anything you want. You can just sit on... [a] mountain or something like that, and just watch the sunset if you’d like. You’re not pushed to do anything in the game.”

The Tomorrow Children was still a bit nebulous for me, so I asked Cuthbert to give me a scenario – a random scenario – where an everyday gamer might find himself or herself playing the game. Here’s what he said.

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The Tomorrow Children was still a bit nebulous for me, so I asked Cuthbert to give me a scenario – a random scenario – where an everyday gamer might find himself or herself playing the game.

“Well, they’ll start in the town... The first thing, you’ll probably look around and there will be some AI characters, the policeman, and people like that, or the bus driver. The first thing they might do is speak to the bus driver, and he might talk about the current state of the town, or he might even give you a little, small mission to do. He might say, ‘Actually, can you go and find me two crystals?’ or something. And that kind of kicks you off to go and do that.”

“But you don’t have to do it,” he continued. “So it’s a totally free will kind of thing. The real keys of the game [are] that every single little thing you do, no matter whether you’ve been asked to do it or not, is recorded in a work log. And then, when you go to the Ministry of Labor, it lists it all up, every single thing. So, like say if you carried a piece of wood ten meters, it will list that up, and you’ll get a point for it. And those points are totaled up, and then you’re paid. You get your wage from that. And then you use your wage to do other stuff. You can buy weapons and stuff to help you fight the monsters off and that kind of thing.”

“So, it’s quite an interesting cycle,” Cuthbert admitted. “And it’s funny. I might go mine in the mountains for like an hour, and I’ll come back, and then I’ll go to the Labor Office and it just lists up all the things I was doing. It’s just funny, just watching that list, you know? ‘Oh yeah, I did do that, didn’t I?’”

Mining. Mining everything!

At this point in our conversation, I noted to Cuthbert that the game seems super complex, even in its looseness. I wondered if there was any sort of win/loss scenario, or if The Tomorrow Children doesn’t set those kinds of conditions. In turn, he compared it to Nintendo’s famous franchise, Animal Crossing. He noted that there will be a closed alpha test for the game that will be released at the end of October, and that game has rules to speed things up and get Q-Games the data they need to make improvements before launch, but the final game will be all about building up and protecting your homestead, one you build with scores of other players.

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I wondered if there was any sort of win/loss scenario, or if The Tomorrow Children doesn’t set those kinds of conditions. In turn, he compared it to Nintendo’s famous franchise, Animal Crossing.

“The actual, final game will be persistent, and it’ll be about you trying to protect your town. You’re living there with 50 to 100 other people, and if the numbers start going down, then you are going to have to move to another town, because your town might get destroyed by monsters because you can’t defend it. Or, you [can] try and bring other people in to help you protect it.”

Interestingly, each town in the game is what Cuthbert refers to as a “shard.” Everything surrounding each town is actually identical; it’s about what the town does in those surrounding environs that will be different, and will ultimately chart and alter their path, for better or for worse.

I asked Cuthbert to explain what Sony’s buy-in with the game was. Obviously, their relationship with Q-Games has been long and fruitful, and they’re publishing the game, which essentially locks it in as a PlayStation exclusive. But he makes the point that Sony’s been very hands-off, too. It’s a second-party game, but Sony’s input on the product has been minimal. “We’ve used all our PixelJunk ways of working to make the game, which means you’re not listening to anybody outside of the company,” he said.

The finer points of The Tomorrow Children, at least in terms of how and when it will be released, are still in flux. Once the alpha testing period is over, Q-Games will have a better idea of what needs to be fixed, and how long those fixes will take. But the company is targeting release in early 2015. They suspect it’ll be a digital-only release, but that also remains to be seen.

We’ll have much more on The Tomorrow Children in between now and its eventual release, right here on IGN.